Monday, 14 July 2014

Russia tried to invade Ukraine last weekend, and we didn't even notice

The fog of war is notorious for obscuring
our view of military operations, but it must be rare in the annals of human
conflict for a nuclear-armed superpower to attempt to invade a large European
country without anyone apparently noticing.

But that's apparently what happened on the
night of July 12-13, if the Ukrainian authorities are to be believed (and they
are generally a rather more reliable source than their counterparts in Moscow.)

According to Kyiv, a large column of
Russian armor (estimates ranging from 100 to 200 vehicles) was halted by
Ukrainian air strikes as it attempted to cross from Russia into Ukraine's
Luhansk oblast, the southern portion of which is still under the control of the
Russian-led insurgent forces. The Ukrainian authorities say part of the column
was destroyed, and the rest abandoned its attempt to enter Ukraine. Moreover,
the Ukrainian armed forces said that this column was just one of several
Russian attack groups that were moving on Ukraine, openly, under the Russian
flag. It added that Ukrainian forces were attacked from Russian territory by
artillery and Grad multiple rocket launchers. The Russian actions were deemed
by the Ukrainian military as a military invasion of the territory of Ukraine.

Yet there has been not a peep about this
dramatic escalation of the war in Ukraine in the Western media, probably
because of the difficulty of independently verifying such reports, given the
complex, confused, and frankly dangerous situation in eastern Ukraine.

Nevertheless, there had been warning signs
for a number of days prior to this incident that the Russians might be planning
an invasion.

British-Ukrainian journalist Askold
Krushelnysky reported on July 9 in an article entitled "A Dreadful
Inexorability" in the National Review Online that "serious
sources" in the Russian government had informed him that Russian President
Vladimir Putin was planning a peacekeeping intervention in Ukraine in "the
next few days." We might have witnessed (or rather failed to witness)
precisely that over the weekend, though luckily the attempt appears to have
been thwarted by Ukraine's military. Krushelnysky also claimed that senior
Russian diplomats had informed the German government that Russia would press on
with its plans to intervene in Ukraine even if the EU did finally decide to
impose its third wave of sanctions. In addition, Krushelnysky said Russian
military vehicles with peacekeeping markings have been stationed close to
Russia's border with Ukraine, and that MPs from Russia's lower house of
parliament, the Duma, have been ordered to stay in the vicinity of Moscow.

These claims have been backed up by Dmitry
Tymchuk, of the Information Resistance group in Ukraine, who has connections
with the Ukrainian military and who had proved to be a reasonably reliable
source in the past. Tymchuk, in a posting made on the morning of July 14, said
that Ukraine was effectively being invaded by Russia. He also warned that he
had it from several sources that Russian special forces were planning to insert
themselves in the insurgency zone in Ukraine on July 15, although the Ukrainian
defense authorities said they had no information confirming this.

Together with the multiple reports of
Russian armored columns with peacekeeping markings, and the recent
well-documented incidents of Russian tanks, APCs and artillery pieces being
allowed through the border by Russia into the insurgency zone in Ukraine, this appears
to be the continuation of Putin's "frog-in-a-pot" strategy of
gradually turning up the heat on the hapless and unwary frog (Ukraine), until
it is cooked (invaded, dismembered).

And over the weekend we may have seen Putin
give another tweak to the burner – Russia claimed that Ukraine had shelled a
town across the border in Russia itself, killing a man and seriously injuring two
women. Ukraine denied being responsible, and claimed that the Russian-led
insurgents had engineered the incident themselves to provide justification for
Russia to stage an open invasion.

Given the covert nature of Russia's
military operations against Ukraine, and the previously mentioned difficulty of
establishing the truth or falsehood of claimed incidents in the war zone, it's
impossible to say for certain who was responsible for shelling Russian
territory. But as Ukrainian forces close in on the insurgents' strongholds of
Luhansk and Donetsk, it's highly probable that we will hear of more such
incidents - any of which, the Ukrainian authorities worry, could be used by
Moscow as the pretext for an open invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

It's to be hoped that in the future, with
the benefit of hindsight, Ukraine and the rest of the world will not ruefully
have to admit that "all the signs were there – we should have seen it
coming, but we didn't notice."